Wednesday, August 31, 2011

James Taranto in today's WSJ was talking about Obama's one-man echo chamber (good article, and hat tip to Morgan via HKoB for it) where he brough up one of my favorite columnists to avoid (his zealous idiocy makes my head explode) ... Eugene Robinson.

This is a moment for the president to suppress his reflex for preemptive compromise. The unemployment crisis is so deep and self-perpetuating that only a big, surprising, over-the-top jobs initiative could have real impact. Boldness will serve the nation well--and, coincidentally, boost Obama's reelection prospects.

Yeah. Because hey. That's what we all really want. 4 more years of Fundamental Transformation. Hey, wouldn't suppressing his ... [snicker] reflex for preemptive compromise [/snicker] be intransigent?

Seriously, what this really shows is that the left is out of airspeed, out of altitude, and out of ideas. "It's time to be bold." They don't really have a plan, but that's not important. What's important is to be bold. All they can do is hope that their savior will come up with some magic play that nobody's ever thought of before after a brilliant night of brainstorming (with his shirt sleeves rolled up) and come up with a Sooper Awesome Plan so that they can all say, "look, weren't we all brilliant for backing him?" That's what they're reduced to, and they have nobody to blame for it but themselves. But nobody has a clue what that sooper plan would be. Especially not Obama, as his philosophy is clear and predictible as a broken record.

Sadly, what they're probably doing is coming up with what they hope is the perfect rhetorical flourish to finally (this time for sure!) sell us all on Statist Socialism without using the word "Socialism", thus finally "Fundamentally Trasform"ing America. Remember, with Obama, success is always one [more] "great speech" away.

As if to underscore this point, Eugene continues:

Obama and his advisers know very well that this is the wrong time to cut government spending. They know that using federal money to seed big new initiatives--to upgrade the nation's crumbling infrastructure, jump-start the "clean" energy industry, retrain the unemployed so they can compete in tomorrow's job market--would give the economy a much-needed boost. They know, too, that federal action to buoy the housing market would help revive consumer spending, thus giving corporations a reason to invest the estimated $1 trillion they're sitting on.

And this is different from what the President has been pushing .... how? This is what Eugene thinks the "new" sooper-dooper plan should be? Clearly, what Eugene wants is a sooper duper new sales pitch for the same crap sandwich. And really, Eugene isn't any different from the rest of the Obama lap dogs on this. He's just an easy target.

You know this just hit me. It's a little bit like Charlotte's Web (I love that story, but ...). Think about it. What was special about Wilbur? He was a pretty ordinary pig. Less than ordinary. Ok, really what made him "special" was that he had friends. Otherwise he was just another pig. But I digress.

In order that Wilbur would be able to continue a life hanging out with his friends and they with him, Charlotte came up with a PR campaign.

"Some Pig""Terriffic""Radiant"
and then finally"Humble"(Well we wouldn't want all that terrifficness and radiance to go to his head).

Charlotte's plan was to make Wilbur sufficiently famous and popular to keep him from being turned to bacon and ham hocks. You'll notice she wasn't terribly specific. "Bold" could easily be thrown in that list. And that's all it is.

President "Hope" & "Change" comes up with a new speech to tell us why we all need Socialism, and it's the only fair thing to do and after all, aren't Americans fair, yada yada .... and the left pundit-o-sphere all says "Terriffic!" "Radiant!" "Bold!"

7 comments:

Another one for the Leftist Lexicon. "Doing Something" doesn't actually mean, you know, doing something -- sitting down, looking at the facts, coming up with a plan that one can actually implement. No, Doing Something seems to mean "talking a lot about doing something, then pointing to all the talking we have just done as evidence that 'we're working really hard,' and then pointing to that hard work as evidence that Something has been Done. And then, of course, calling your opponents racists if they point out that no tangible action has been taken."

In this, it's very similar to another beloved Leftist activity, "raising awareness." When you "raise awareness" of AIDS, say, you march around one afternoon with big signs, getting a nice sugar high off your own moral superiority and maybe hooking up with a hippie chick. Then you claim that "awareness" has been raised, and in some vague magical way, this cures AIDS.

I can't make heads or tails of either thing, but then again, I'm not Smart like leftists.

You've helped me put a term to a condition I've been suffering with. A lot of other Americans suffer with this too. I'll call it "web" fatigue.

I see a real sickly pig in the pen but the web says "Terrific." The pig is destroying the pen he's in and the rest of the barn and the "web" says, "Radiant." The cost of maintaining the pig is gonna break the farm but the "web" says "Obama's Awesome."

Then when something close to a prize winner (certainly closer than what we have now) is in the pin the web says, "Village Idiot."And only gets worse from there. By the end of the pig's term I'm ready for a new pig just to stop the haranguing of the "web."

There's a major difference between the O and Zuckerman's Famous Pig - Wilbur could actually, you know, do stuff. People really didn't believe that he was "Some Pig" until he started turning somersaults and entertaining folks. Where it really counts, he had large amounts...

So Wilbur, as it happens, wasn't just a good pig, he was good business - he worked hard, lived up to his clippings, and provided a beneift to the Zuckermans in exchange for his keep. Nowadays, that would lead to demands from the cows that he pay his fair share.